Over last weekend while we were away I read Tracey Thorn’s book Bedsit Disco Queen. It’s a fast fun read that I found hard to put down, consuming it in huge gulps over two days. Not that I’ve read lots of them, but I’m finding that I really like reading memoirs of musicians I admire. A few years ago I read Rat Girl by Kristin Hersh and had many of the same feelings about that book. As an aside, thank you, reading journal, for reminding me that it was not last year but December 2010! Honestly I can’t believe I ever didn’t keep a reading journal.

Tracey Thorn is probably best known as 1/2 of Everything But The Girl (her partner Ben Watt the other 1/2), but she’s also famous in indiepopland for her earlier band the Marine Girls. More recently she’s been releasing solo records that are also fantastic (and not just because her lyrics sometimes speak to growing-older-lady stuff that resonates increasingly well with me). Her voice is frankly amazing, and it’s lovely that she’s back to recording again. I wasn’t cool enough to listen to Marine Girls when they were actually making records, though I came to them later during my serious indiepop phase in the early-mid-90s. Probably the first song I ever heard that featured Tracey Thorn’s singing was “The Paris Match” by Style Council. I feel like I used to own a vinyl copy of EBTG’s 2nd record “Love Not Money” — I have a vivid memory of listening to it in our living room when I was about 15, and my younger sibs giggling at the cover photo of the two little boys peeing into a puddle. But I can only find the CD in our house now.

The thing about reading a book about music (and this book sprinkles lyrics throughout, as did Kristin Hersh’s book) is that you can’t help but hear the music the whole way through. It’s a strange experience: as a fan I know the music side of the story, the discography and maybe the bare outlines of the musicians’ lives, in addition to occasional insights from the song lyrics. In some ways you’d think it would be boring to read this kind of a book because of what’s already known. But it’s fascinating, really. Context is added, details filled in (e.g. the story of “Hatfield 1980”). It’s also compelling despite the known bits: at one point last weekend Jonathan was calling me and I said “not just yet, I’m at the part when they release ‘Missing'” as if it were a cliffhanger — which, in a way, it was. Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt have 3 kids who are a little bit older than my kid, so hearing about them was naturally interesting for me, too (as with Kristin Hersh’s writing/tweeting about her kids).

Knowing those details changes the music for me, too. This week EBTG has been on fairly constant repeat — I was pleasantly surprised to find that I’d already ripped the CDs at work as well as home (go me!). The extra narrative in my head that now accompanies many of the songs is quite nice. The only down side is that all of this is making me wish I’d seen them in concert more than just the one (fabulous) time. Until about a minute ago I thought it was the “Walking Wounded” tour, but I just pawed through all of my old ticket stubs to reveal that no, it was Hammerstein Ballroom in November 1999, the “Temperamental” tour and the very last time that EBTG ever played live in the US. Hammerstein is a pleasant if somewhat-huger-than-I-prefer venue, and this concert was also one of the first that I remember feeling like I was really a grown-up: given the choice between the open dance floor below and the balcony with seats, we opted for the latter.